Hyderabad: Day 1

Today started out with an 11:00 brunch meeting at the hotel. I met up with Chris, Brian, and Jon at we ate at the restaurant at the hotel. I went with a safe choice - pancakes - which were actually good. The syrup tasted fake, though. We left the for the office around noon. It was about a 25 minute drive, which was even crazier than the drive from the airport last night. If only I had a video camera to capture the madness that is Hyderabad traffic! I saw some goats walking by the side of the road, but by the time I pulled out my camera we had already passed them.


Local movie star - passed this on the way to the office


I suppose this is an internet cafe...?!


Thank goodness Coke is ubiquitous... yummy!

Once we got to the office, we signed in and met with the Paj, who is from India, but lived in Dallas for 11 years. I actually met him earlier this year at a lunch at Uncle Julio's in Dallas. Over the summer he accepted a 2-year assignment here in Hyderabad. He gave us a tour of the Deloitte buildings. There are 3 large buildings referred to as A, B, and C blocks. I work in B. At 2:00 our team members began arriving for work. They generally work from 2-11 pm India Standard time, so that they are online during some of the working hours in the US. We have 6 team members in my group in the Hyderabad office - 3 guys and 3 girls. They are all so nice! We spent a lot of time today just chatting. I have been working with Vinod and Santosh for almost 2 years, but today was the first time I met them in person!

On Friday, the entire Hyderabad tax practice is having a big "end of busy season" party to mark the end of the 10/15 deadline - which doesn't really apply to the work I do, but hey, a party sounds like fun to me. Because this is also around the time of the Indian festival Diwali, it is going to be a big affair where everyone wears traditional Indian dress. While I was talking with Sakhi, and I asked her where the best place to buy a sari would be so that I can wear traditional dress to the party. Sakhi mentioned that her sister is a designer and makes all kinds of clothes. She offered to pick me up on Wednesday morning and take me to meet her sister. I'm so excited - I'll be getting a custom-made traditional Indian sari.

After touring the facilities and meeting the team this afternoon, we 4 expats went to meet Ravi, who is the top tax partner here. We talked for almost an hour with him about the operations here and the unique challenges that this practice has faced. It was so interesting learning about how different cultural customs affect the workforce here. Family life plays a much bigger role here in someone's career decisions. For example, right before a woman gets married, she will sometimes quit her job because she thinks her in-laws would not approve of her working after the wedding. Parents are relied on heavily for career advice, so much so that the firm even has "parents days" where parents are invited to tour the facilities and meet with the HR department. Now I understand more about the girl I met last November in Orlando at training. She was from Hyderabad in the US on a 6-week rotation and she told me how homesick she was and that she cried every night because she missed her parents. At the time I thought it was a little strange, but now I understand their family bonds a little more.

By early evening I was starving. The 10 of us left for dinner at the Novotel hotel around 7:30. The Novotel is a gorgeous hotel in more of a modern style than the Taj Krishna. The restaurant was buffet-style, but when I say that, you can't picture it like an all-you can eat Chinese buffet or something like the Golden Corral - this place was really nice. The cuisine was mostly Indian, but there was a very large selection. I cautiously put a lot of little amounts of different foods on my plate. To my surprise, I liked most of it - even the spicy stuff. My favorites were the biryani (a Hyderabad specialty rice dish) and the nan (flat bread very similar to a tortilla). I also had some "chicken clear soup" which was basically like chicken broth with vegetables. For dessert I had some mango ice cream and a little taste of rice pudding.



After dinner we took a different route back to the office. I finally saw a traffic signal, and it's a good thing there was one, because it was at a CRAZY intersection. While we were stopped at the red light, two little boys no more than 5 years old walked right out into traffic and started rubbing the car with rags and begging for money. One of them even put his little hands up to the window and peered directly into the car. Then the light turned green, and the boys scampered back to the median where there mother was sitting nursing a baby. Our car sped off and my 3 coworkers acted as if they hadn't seen a thing.

Now I am back in my hotel room and it's just after midnight. I can hardly believe that in the span of just a few miles, you can have a 5-star hotel, people living in tents, the buildings of giant US companies, and little children begging in the streets. It is so different from everything I've ever known!